Literature Review

Activists advocating for a better treatment of animals have been using various platforms to promote the welfare or the rights of animals. In recent years, some have proposed to extend “legal personhood” to animals. This strategy would allow animals to get direct access to the special category of “persons” which legal systems associate with a plethora of the most robust kinds of protections and rights. By contrast, the sluggish incorporation of ethical concerns about animals within legal frameworks seems to have trouble moving past the recognition that animals are sentient beings that should not be treated cruelly and into a normatively more stringent set of entitlements that would grant proper consideration to animal needs. Legal personhood is, therefore, a much coveted golden ticket to our political community. In this article, I examine the arguments deployed to obtain it through judicial channels by an American animal rights group (the Nonhuman Rights Project). I focus on a 2015 judicial decision rejecting their petition for a writ of habeas corpus, as this case is the most detailed and representative of their assimilationist stance. This kind of animal rights activism aims at showing that animals are “like us” and should therefore be treated “like us”. I will explain the philosophical foundations implicit to the position defended by the animal rights group in order to test their internal coherence and reveal their inherent limitations. Most of my arguments will cast doubts on this assimilationist strategy. In doing so, I draw from the disciplines of law and moral philosophy in order to recognize both the importance of legal strategies for animal rights advocacy and the difficulties that arise from capitalizing on moral theories and values cherry-picked because of their rhetorical purchase within legal and political discourses.

This study aims to propose a framework to drive organizations, and particularly multinational enterprises, to understand and internalize a sustainable mindset for implementing efficient and effective corporate sustainability initiatives and helping them achieve sustainable development goals (SDGs).

While environmental and social research have generated a large amount of information and data on how values and environmental ethics relate to sustainable development, there are no studies that examine the missing links reflected in the terminology of the sustainable development definition that alienates it from its ecological ethos. This paper reviews the concept of sustainable development that continues to remain vague even two decades after the Brundtland Commission report. It then examines the limitations in the contemporary anthropocentric conceptualization of sustainable development with a utilitarian ethic and argues for a more ecocentric reinterpretation of its definition that is more inclusive and incorporates recognition of the socio-ecological values. The paper concludes with a call for a revised global resolution and a framework for sustainable development based on its reinterpretation that recognizes the interdependence of humans with the rest of the ecosphere.

Concepts such as ecosystem services and natural capital illustrate the benefits that people gain from preserving ecosystems, but they overlook wildlife’s ethical right to thrive independent of any benefit to humans. Many nature conservation bodies have changed their mission to give more emphasis to human benefits. The intrinsic value of non-human nature has all but disappeared from their arguments for conservation. This article examines the pitfalls of the shift to this anthropocentric mindset. It argues that non-human nature’s right to survive can be accounted for in decision-making, namely “ecodemocracy”.

Ecocentrism, or green ideology, offers a perspective on the relationships between human beings and nature that is radically different from the human-centred outlook within which democratic decision-making procedures have developed. Green ideology does not accept humans’ innate right to dominate other life-forms. Rather, human beings are considered part of nature and the various parts are seen as having value in their own right, irrespective of their perceived usefulness for human beings. In this study, I seek to formulate a ”green” democratic theory or, at least, identify the ”seeds” of one using ecocentrism as my point of departure. In so doing, I focus on three basic democratic values - liberty, equality and participation. Although these values are presumed essential to all democratic theories, I argue that the interpretations are somewhat ”elastic” in character. Thus, the boundary between democratic norms of process and content is placed somewhat differently in different versions of democratic theory. The green contribution to democratic thought introduces human environmental rights and rights of the non-human biota, which in turn call for democratic representation. Furthermore, eco-democracy proposes an ”environmental citizenship” that not only embraces environmental rights, but also citizen obligations towards the natural environment. I show that these eco-democratic norms have no exact equivalent within more traditional democratic theorising (which is represented in this study by a representative and a more participatory variant of democratic theory). This study also points to a rather propitious ”breeding-ground” for the ecodemocratic ideas among Swedish political actors at the beginning of the 1990s. Ecocentric interpretations of democratic core values have a position on the political parties’ agendas, there is an active environmental movement that propagates for these ideas, and there is relatively widespread recognition of eco-democratic norms within the Swedish public. Thus, I conclude that the elasticity of democratic core values is not ”only” a theoretical construction, but also an aspect of contemporary Swedish democratic culture.

What obligations do scholars of rhetoric and public address have to understand, address, and sustain the conditions of earthly coexistence? Only if the field of rhetoric embraces a genuinely ecological notion of rhetoric, the author argues, and only if we collectively commit to addressing the ecological dimensions of our various objects of study, can we truly give back to the earth in ways that honor all that it has given, and continues to give, to us. Toward that end, this essay outlines several dimensions of an “ecocentric rhetoric.“

Democracy is a matter of effective communication, not just preference aggregation. Normally it is only communication among humans about human interests that is at issue. But democracy can also exist or be denied in human dealings with the natural world. Ecological democratisation is therefore a matter of better integration of political and ecological communication. Principles of ecological democracy can be used both to criticise existing institutional arrangements, and to inspire a search for alternative institutions that would better integrate politics and ecology.

Is there a necessary, in‐principle connection between ecocentric values and democracy or is the relationship merely contingent? Is it possible to incorporate the interests of the non‐human community into the ground rules of democracy? Through an immanent ecological critique of the regulative ideals and institutions of liberal democracy, it is suggested that ecocentric values and democracy can be connected to some extent ‐ at least in the same way that liberalism and democracy are connected ‐ through an extension of the principle of autonomy and the rights discourse to include ecological interests. However, the move from autonomy, to rights, to an ecologically grounded democracy encounters a number of hazards, not all of which can be successfully negotiated owing to the individualistic premises of the rights discourse. While the rights discourse may be extended to include human environmental rights and animal rights in relation to captive and domesticated species, it becomes considerably strained and unworkable (ontologically, politically and legally) in relation to the remaining constituents of the biotic community.

This response article written from ‘outside’ the Swedish–Danish contexts of this special issue considers how we might highlight and make additional ecocentric meaning of some of the terms most frequently used in this collection. In the first instance my focus is on ‘meaning’ but this is expanded to include other terms such as valuing, values, ethics and democracy. The way we value meaning demands elaboration because ‘meaning‐making’ is pedagogically central to the ecological experience of learning, crucial to fulfilling the not always clear aims of environmental and sustainability education and their regional variations (including education for sustainable development), important for their research, and, indeed, underpins the philosophical quest more generally. Thus in this article, I introduce an ecology of the meaning of meaning, meaning levels, valuing and values, as they might inform stronger notions of democracy in critical approaches to learning, education, sustainability and development. This existentially focused introduction to ‘meaning’ and its ‘making’ is set against the politics of ‘climate change’ where political leaders have recently made grand declarations about the globalized moral challenge induced by human‐induced climate change. How might pedagogues and researchers imagine the place of meaning and role of value in learning and in an education for sustainable development when the crisis of meaning lies at the intersections of the intensely personal and moral and the globally abstracted political?

Today, numerous constitutions provide for a rights-based approach to environmental protection. Based as they are on an instrumentalist rationality that seeks to promote human entitlements to nature, the majority of these rights remain anthropocentric. Although there are growing calls within academic and activist circles to reorient rights alongside an ecocentric ontology, only one country to date has taken the bold step to bestow rights on nature in its constitution. The Ecuadorian Constitution of 2008 announces the transition from a juridical anthropocentric orientation to an ecocentric position by recognizing enforceable rights of nature. This article critically reflects on the legal significance of granting rights to nature, with specific reference to Ecuador’s constitutional experiment. It first provides a contextual description of rights in an attempt to illustrate their anthropogenic genesis, and then explores the notion of environmental rights. The following part traces the discourse that has developed over the years in relation to the rights of nature by revealing aspects of an ecocentric counter-narrative. The final part focuses specifically on the Ecuadorian constitutional regime and provides (i) a historical-contextual discussion of the events that led to the adoption of the rights of nature; (ii) an analysis of the constitutional provisions directly and indirectly related to the rights of nature; and (iii) a critical appraisal of whether those provisions, so far, measure up to the rhetoric of constitutional ecocentric rights of nature in that country.

This article reflects on how Colombia, as an important laboratory in transitional restorative justice, a 60-year long internal conflict, is experiencing an ‘ecocentric turn.’ This transition is not free from contradiction, ambivalence or great challenges. For this article, ‘ecocentric turn’ means an epistemological movement from anthropocentrism to ecocentrism, with biocentrism as the middle stage between the two ends. We argue that the ecocentric turn does not exclusively imply postures that are purely anthropocentric or ecocentric, but also ones that are hybrid and eclectic, which for the purposes of this article will be called biocentric positions. The ecocentric turn is reviewed on two levels: the first is the institutional level, focusing on the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP for its name in Spanish); and the second level corresponds to the experience of Palestina, Huila, a non-ethnic campesino community.

Since 2016, at least three domestic Colombian tribunals have each issued a decision that represents a new era for Colombian environmental justice.These decisions represent an advance towards changing the anthropocentric paradigm of Colombin justice, for two key reasons. First, they recognize that certain ecosystems hold rights, for example the Amazon rainforest. Second, they include an explicity ecocentric understanding of protecting natural habitats. However, this change has been gradual. For example, whilst the decisions of the Colombian Constitutional Court in 2016 and the Supreme Court of Justice in 2018 both recognized some natural entities as subjects of rights, they also reaffirmed the instrumental value of ecosystems for the human species. And although the sentene issued by the Administrative Tribunal of Boyaca in 2018 emphasised an ecocentric perspective, prioritising the rights of nature over the rights of communities, the court still confirmed the need to compensate communities affected by this decision. Nevertheless, these decisions, which are the result of persistent environmental activism, have improved environmental protection in Colombia through the judicial system, integrating a perspective that transcends the traditional anthropocentric view.